Cramer: Individual Stocks Moving the Market

After the markets got hit by a slew of negative data, Cramer is puzzled as to why the markets aren't down big. Take a look at it, he says, highlighting that the service industry grows less than forecast, a new report from an unemployment service showed that jobs aren't yet coming back, the Fed's minutes said that in 2010 the economy will be subdued and the market isn't as excited by the Google phone as speculated.

Not to mention, says Cramer, that the market is overbought - there is too much buying and not enough selling, which drives stocks up faster than they should be - making the stock market vulnerable to this kind downtrodden national news. With all this negative news, the market should have been down today, says Cramer, but instead it had a flat day, so what happened?

Back on the Bull?

Cramer helps you figure out today's market action.

Cramer points out a simple answer: "There are too many solid micro stories," which basically means that many individual companies are giving reasons for investors to buy, and the combined effect trumps the large-scale national news.

He points to Ford, which hit a 52-week high in Wednesday's session, in the wake of excellent sales reports and increased profitability. Even though the company keeps issuing stock, Cramer says, people just keep buying. With a host of bankruptcies in the sector, Cramer says that investors simply don't have enough stocks to invest in, reasoning that this is why companies like Lear, Tenneco , Magna and Johnson Controls continue to follow an upward trend.

Cramer also highlights Dow Chemical , whose stock keeps climbing on upgrades and underestimated earnings power present in the space as a whole. More of the market's micro stories are in tech companies hitting their 52-week highs, like Cree, Western Digital, AMD, Sandisk or Skyworks Solutions, who are all moving upwards in tandem, although Cramer feels as though they should have dropped following new factory additions and increased supply. Another micro story was in the fertilizers, which was Mosaic, although posting a disappointing number, moved higher.

With these examples and more, Cramer can only have one explanation for the overall trend: "It is a remarkable bull market. Not a bear market." Despite this, he sees the bulls as being on the defensive, but can't tell why this is such a pervasive feeling, which may suggest that it all may be subsiding.

What's the bottom line? On a day where the market should have shot lower, individual stocks proved to be more important to the overall market than the stocks and stories that have traditionally been the big guns.